


In Absentia

by mylittleredgirl



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s01e15 Before I Sleep, Episode: s04e02 Lifeline, Gen, Hopeful Ending, it's legitimately gen but you know how i feel about these things, let's call it a pre-fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 17:46:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14795063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleredgirl/pseuds/mylittleredgirl
Summary: After “Lifeline,” Elizabeth is gone and Atlantis won’t talk to him.





	In Absentia

*

It’s John who notices first. The city that used to light up instantly under his hands now… _pauses_.

At first, he assumes it’s him. His nerves are shot. He’s barely slept. They’re on another planet now, one whose gravity gives an extra weight to his steps that’s both unfamiliar and entirely appropriate. 

But the jumpers are fine, happy to go wherever he tells them to. The systems on Atlantis still do what he wants, but they’re no longer as…

“… eager to please,” he says to McKay and makes a face at how that sounds once it hits the air. 

Thankfully, Rodney ignores the plethora of ways to make fun of him and just dismisses him out of hand. “Atlantis has hundreds of systems with independent processing centers. There’s no way that _all_  of them could suffer from system-wide lag at the same time.”

“We just flew the city halfway across a _galaxy—”_

“—and I definitely needed to be reminded of that, when we’ve got explosive damage on the piers, we still can’t get the primary lighting up to standard capacity, and I personally have a thousand things between me and my next quiet meal.”

“Well, now it’s a thousand and one.”

Rodney rolls his eyes. “You know, your weird personal relationship with the city is not my highest priority here.”

“Just let me know what you find.”

The door opens for him on his way out of the room like it always does, but it feels different. Hollow.

Maybe it’s him, not Atlantis. Maybe he’s sending mixed signals through his ATA gene. He’s not exactly thinking clearly these days.

*

Days pass. Rodney never does figure out how to get the lights up to full power, and while the others complain as they go through the arduous process of repairing the nonessential systems, it suits John fine. He drags himself from room to room, conscious of the extra .08 g’s and everyone’s eyes watching him, especially when he talks to Colonel Carter. They’ll follow his lead, he knows. When Carter says he can’t go back for her, he hears Elizabeth’s words in another voice.

He’s older now. Wiser, by experience. The last time, their first day in Atlantis, he yelled and argued and convinced his new boss to let him mount a rescue mission, and then he started a war. 

It still feels like Atlantis won’t talk to him. It’s a message delivered in nanoseconds, such a brief delay that those with less command over their ATA gene still haven’t noticed, but he feels it every time and it leaves him cold. He always had the most direct connection with Atlantis, genetically, but he wonders now if there was another piece to the puzzle. 

*

As it turns out, he’s not the only one looking for a missing link. There are problems all over the city—understandable, given the physical strain placed on it in the last week—but even when the obvious damage is repaired, the power capacity never reaches 100%.

“It could be any one of many things: We are on a different planet, with a different electromagnetic field, different gravity—”

“That shouldn’t matter.” One thing hasn’t changed: Rodney still never lets Zelenka finish a sentence. “Why would it matter what planet it’s on? Atlantis wasn’t native to Lantea, either.”

There’s a second of silence in the briefing room, mid-discussion, like they’re expecting Elizabeth to weigh in.

Carter speaks instead: “The Ancients were the ones who relocated Atlantis the first time, and their technology is still far beyond our understanding.”

Rodney bristles. “I wouldn’t say _far_  beyond, that’s—”

John turns toward Elizabeth’s chair, to exchange a roll of his eyes for her fondly exasperated _Rodney_ expression, before she’ll jump in to console Rodney’s ego and move the meeting along, but her chair is just a chair now, empty and spun around the wrong way, and she’s being tortured by Replicators. 

Staring at her empty chair is the first time he thinks it: _Or she’s dead._

*

That night, when he can’t sleep over the tidal waves of this new ocean crashing against the city walls, he studies the map of un-surveyed areas and buildings like the answer is out there. His eyes gloss over the details, like his loss of connection to the city runs both ways and he can’t look directly at it. In frustration, he throws on boots, picks a direction, and gets started.

He doesn’t know why he goes there first, doesn’t actually think he’s _going_ anywhere in particular until he arrives in a room so bright it’s blinding after a full week in shadow. He blinks to clear the spots from his vision and finds himself looking at an Ancient stasis chamber, the other Elizabeth’s stasis chamber, fully powered and empty.

The irrational urge to step inside is so strong that he backs out of the room and slams his hand on the controls to close the door behind him. 

*

He doesn’t remember walking back to the central spires, only comes back to himself as he pounds his fist on Rodney’s door.

“For God’s sake, _what?_ ” Rodney is staring at him, hair awry, shirt wrinkled. 

John can’t speak for a moment, the combined enormity of what this could mean clashing with the complete lack of sense it makes. Then, finally, “You need to see something.”

“What, _now?_  The first chance I have to get more than two hours of sleep at a time and— what are you doing here, anyway? Have you never heard of a radio? Of all the…”

John nods along with his rant, because he deserves it, and because it takes a while for him to force out the words: “I think… it’s about Elizabeth.” 

Rodney’s attitude shifts on a dime. “What do we need?”

“We’re not going after her,” John says, again, as hard to say now as it was five days ago. He forces himself not to look away as hope drains from Rodney’s face.

“Then…?”

“Get dressed.”

*

The room is still just as bright. 

“Oh. Wow.”

Rodney goes right for the Ancient computer panel, leaving John to sit on a long-abandoned work table and just look, fingers itching to tap his earpiece and report in to someone who’s no longer there. _You’ll never guess where we are, Elizabeth. You’ll never guess what we found._

John doesn’t know what he expects Rodney to find, but he doesn’t.

“The same amount of power is reaching this room as everywhere else. There’s no difference. Nothing.” Rodney sits down on the table next to him. “Of course, there shouldn’t be power running to this room at all. We shut it off, after…”

She stood in this room for ten thousand years.

When they first arrived, Atlantis seemed to sing with the rising harmonies of equipment humming on and lights beckoning them forward, and Elizabeth thought it was because the city recognized _him_.

“She’s been out of the city before,” John says, feeling a little desperate, like he’s in a Replicator city under fire and Elizabeth is, Elizabeth is… “She’s been on missions, been back to Earth.”

“At which time the city hadn’t just flown across a galaxy or suffered explosive decompressions.”

“So you’re saying it’s a coincidence.”

“I’m saying there’s no way this room could magically know if she’s…” Rodney looks away, because no one has actually said out loud yet that she might be dead, even though that’s probably the best case scenario.

For a long minute, there’s no sound beyond their breathing, and the alien waves outside, somehow audible even this deep inside the city.

“You’ll find her,” Rodney says, with a confidence Atlantis doesn’t seem to share. “If anyone can.”

John swallows a rough knot in his throat. “Yeah.”

*

It’s four hours until morning, but John can’t sleep and he isn’t really trying.

In three years, he has never had to _work_ to talk to Atlantis. It was never even a conversation. To him, the Ancient systems, the jumpers, even the city itself aren’t servants that obey his commands; it’s like slipping on a extra set of limbs that move with him as easily as a pair of gloves go along with his hands. There’s a reason Lorne does all the training for new ATA pilots. John can never explain how any of it works, because it just _does_. 

Elizabeth never had the gene, despite Carson’s best efforts, but John knows she talked silently to the city even though it couldn’t understand her. Sometimes, when he’d seek her out on the balcony to share a half-formed thought or just to stand next to her in silence, he knew he was interrupting.

So he tries, fingers brushing the wall of his quarters like he’s looking for a pulse. He separates out a parcel of hope and command confidence from all the confusion and grief he feels, tries to push it through his fingers hard enough to turn the lights up in the control tower.  _I’ll find her_ , he promises, like he told Colonel Carter, like he told his team and everyone else who’s looking to him to deliver them. To lead them without her. 

He knows without checking that it doesn’t work. 

*

He keeps trying anyway, for days. Weeks.

_I’ll find her_.

_I’ll find her._

_I’ll—_

For all his efforts, the lights stay dim. It’s not a priority, and everyone gets used to it, the way they adjust to their new circadian rhythms and the weight of their own bodies. 

_I’ll find her_.

It bothers him a little—a lot—that the city doesn’t seem like it’s listening, especially when he so badly needs someone to talk to. With everything that’s changing and going wrong, without Elizabeth on the balcony, it seems to fit that he end his days by talking to walls. 

_I’ll find her._

_I’ll find her._

_I’ll find her._

_Unless…_

Eventually, when he brushes his fingers against the wall in another failing attempt to reassure the city, he can come up with nothing to say. He misses her and Atlantis in the same breath, even though one of them is here, all around him.

The hums and harmonics of the city sound louder that night as he falls asleep, like it’s trying to remember how to sing.

*

When he plans the rescue mission—not his first plan, but the only one Colonel Carter has approved—he keeps it quiet. His team understands, and Carter, and Keller. It’s a long shot, and once they get close enough to scan the Asuran defenses, there’s every likelihood that the mission will be aborted before they even get close.

But it’s _something_. It’s a chance, a hope less theoretical than a general promise to never say die. Twenty four hours from now, he could be walking these halls with her, hearing her voice, replacing his promise to find her with other promises that will mean just as much. 

The jumper bay, when he gets there for pre-launch, is flooded with light. When he touches the wall, to thank Atlantis for the good omen or keep the city updated, he remembers how it felt to have Elizabeth’s voice in his ear saying _You have a go._  

He looks at his assembled team and smiles like the worst is already behind them. 

“Let’s bring her home.”

*

~end~


End file.
